Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. On its face, that sounds like a straightforward story: as legalization slowly opened the door, state by state, city by city, and country by country, people were walking in to give it a try.
I don’t buy that. People didn’t just start smoking weed. Nobody woke up the morning cannabis became legal in their state and decided, for the first time in their life, to try it. The numbers we see out of the gate in brand-new legal markets — state by state, country by country — are high from day one because the demand was never new. People have been using cannabis for decades, underground, illegally. What changed wasn’t appetite. What changed was who got punished for it.
That is the part of this story that doesn’t get said enough. Black and brown people have been arrested for cannabis, while countless white people have used the exact same substances with a fraction of the consequences. In NYC, 90% of low-level weed arrests have been Black and brown people. They are almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than white people. Legalization didn’t create demand. It just made visible—and taxable—something that was already everywhere.
In New York, there’s still a lot of talk about giving back to the communities most harmed by cannabis prohibition, about building new programs to make things right. But that opportunity was largely lost four years ago, when the state started handing out licenses without ensuring the expectations attached to them were actually met. The intention was right. The execution wasn’t. The powers that be have found out you can’t go backward. Expecting all the licensees to provide social give-back to renew their licenses when that wasn’t part of the original documentation doesn’t work now. We have been doing that at Gotham, but it was part of our plan, not the state’s.
Here’s what’s actually killing legal cannabis businesses across the country is that states legalized the product without seriously confronting the illicit market that was already saturating it. The supply chain overlaps completely. Illegal weed is cheaper — of course it is; it isn’t paying taxes, isn’t paying for licensing, isn’t funding the regulatory apparatus states built around legal sales. And yet there’s no real public effort to change that dynamic. Where are the campaigns telling people not to buy illegal weed? Where’s the oversight and enforcement against illegal shops that are undercutting every legal operator trying to do this the right way? There are also hemp products that can be sold anywhere and have zero oversight, directly taking money from the state dispensaries’ pockets, and that means less taxes for the state. States have done shockingly little.
Meanwhile, the conversation gets buried under nonsense from both directions — the “public health crisis” framing on one side, and the almost religious “cannabis will save us all” enthusiasm on the other. Neither is honest. What actually needs attention is much less dramatic and much harder to fix: an industry undermined by poor oversight and a string of poor decisions made by the people responsible for regulating it. And the unions certainly should not be the regulators of law.
Watching how badly this has been handled makes you wonder what else is being managed this way. Legal cannabis could have been a real correction — economically and in terms of justice. Instead, it’s a case study in how much damage gets done when regulation shows up without follow-through and specific social give-back legislation.
